In the spirit of pay-it-forward culture, I’ve gathered the most important learnings from 10 exceptional founders on stage, advice given at startup competition, and finishing with Mr. Karl Lagerfeld himself, also a high school drop-out, and probably the most entrepreneurial and curious soul at LeWeb this year.

Daniel Ek, CEO and Co-founder of Spotify

I was truly glad that Daniel Ek, CEO and Co-founder of Spotify, made it to LeWeb this year, and together with Loic shared the importance of pay-it-forward culture. All success feeds each other and no startup cluster, hub or ecosystem won’t grow, nor bloom, without sharing those successes. I think the European, and specifically Nordic startup ecosystem needs to hear it explicitly from today’s change makers.

Daniel’s most important learnings:

Execution is everything. No offense to innovation, but 95% of success lies in execution.

People are everything. Period.

Focus. Learn how not to do everything.

Please watch the entire interview with more great insights from Daniel.

Sean Parker, Founders Fund, and Shervin Pishevar, Menlo Ventures

One of the biggest failures: Hiring wrong people. As young and naive entrepreneur it’s easy to get impressed by and end up hiring crazy people.

Which naturally leads to: People are great asset class. I also urge you to read Naval Ravikant touching the same concern both Sean and Shervin share: The downside of all smart kids starting their own startups instead of working together and building kick ass teams.

Success and failure amnesia: Despite the successes and failures, keep going, keep building and creating value to people. As Sean put it, with every new venture some things get easier, but one has to be paranoid. Building company is hard.

Timing: Don’t build product 10 years ahead of your time (Bill Gross learnings: Survive until the market is ready)

Kevin Rose, CEO and Co-founder of Milk

Stay true to who you are, pay attention to real hard core users instead of what other smart people tell you.

In order to succeed with community based services and business models, gamification might be great way to hook up to a service, but it gets old really fast, there has to be real utility in the service.

Releasing as invite only app in order to let in passionate people first wasn’t such a great idea after all. You don’t actually want hatred to be your customers first impression. Oink dropped invite only after few weeks.

ps. If you make it the application of the week in App Store, expect huge shot on the arm. It creates more sustainable sign up growth, not just a temporary launch peak due media coverage.

Startup Competition With Advice On The Importance of Focus

One could receive great advice from Startup Competition judges, urging to focus and not try to solve multiple huge problems simultaneously. ClearKarma got the judges excited in the beginning by offering consumers safer food choices, but in the end left them worried by facing a classic chicken and egg problem: Trying to solve two huge problems at the same time. As young startup it’s important to have bold vision, but more importantly, to have the ability to focus. Watch the entire pitch and Q&A.

Hi, I’m Paula Marttila

Paula is Digital Product Advisor and Top 100 Women in Tech in Europe, focusing on product, go-to-market, and internationalization strategies. Her strength is working with all stages of a product’s life cycle.

Pick My Brain! is her fixed price service specifically tailored to early stage startups, gender wage gap adjusted for female founders and co-founders.

Rated as one of the best startup mentors in Europe, Paula has to date mentored over 150 companies on product, marketing, and growth at Seedcamp and Startup Wise Guys startup accelerators. For the past decade she has been actively involved with several women in tech and entrepreneurship initiatives.

Her deep corporate experience ranges from pioneering digital media products and premium subscription services, hiring, sales negotiations, to carrying out direct assignments by the company board of directors. She holds B.S. in Business Economics in International Marketing, and Computer and Systems Sciences.

Paula is Finn full of Sisu, calls Stockholm her home, occasionally spotted in Berlin and other European hot spots. Contact her for your product, go-to-market, and internationalization strategy. Learn more about her work, connect on LinkedIn, Twitter or just Email.